15 Tips to Grow a Social-Media Audience for Your Startup

No matter what stage your startup is in, you’ll want to start or continue to grow your social media audience. The more people you can reach on social media organically and through advertising, the better your launch and your on-going sales will be.

Here are 15 tips for growing your startup’s audience on the three top social networks, starting with strategies common to all of them:

1. Create strong social profiles and pages.

The starting point for growing your audience on any social network is strong profiles and pages for your social accounts. This requires including branded cover photos and profile photos. It also requires filling out all of your details. On Twitter, that’s as simple as a 160-character bio, website link and location. Facebook wants a short description, website link, address and phone number. In short, fill out as many fields for your social profiles and pages as you can.

Next, share a few updates (five to ten) before you start your quest to build an audience. This will give people who visit your social accounts a reason to follow you. If you don’t know what to post, do the following:

2. Share quality content.

Even before your startup gets going fully, start building your audience on most networks by sharing content your target audience will enjoy. For example, if you have a startup for a Facebook marketing tool, start sharing content about Facebook. That could mean blog content, podcasts, videos, presentations, infographics, etc., created by you or by others.

3. Use friend-finding features.

Most networks have a way to connect you with people you know. Twitter allows you to search email contacts, Facebook allows you to search email contacts and utilize an advanced people search. Instagram guides you to your Facebook friends on Instagram in its app. LinkedIn allows you to search your email contacts and suggests current and former classmates and work colleagues based on your profile information.

4. Add links to your top social accounts on your website.

You can do this by adding small square social network icons to your website’s header, footer and sidebar. You can also add the official buttons for each network on your website. You can find the official brand assets, buttons, badges and widgets on Facebook (brand assets and button generator), Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can also look into social network icons on stock image sites like DepositPhotos.